The Ambleside Alibi: 2 (10 page)

She let herself into the house and turned on all the lights. She closed the curtains and switched on the TV. The next day was Sunday and she did not have to be anywhere. She could read, write more Christmas cards, perhaps phone Julie, and generally be a slob for a day. If there was an inch of snow on the roads, it would have been driven over many times before she had to brave it on Monday. Everything would be fine – not just her father had said so, but Melanie, too.

At first when she woke on Sunday, it seemed that her optimism had been justified. She could hear voices outside, as well as a car driving past. The world had not frozen to a standstill, then. There were not six-foot drifts burying all the cars and imprisoning the population in their homes.

But the voices sounded oddly urgent, a man shouting and a young woman replying in a high pitch. Simmy went to the window of her bedroom and looked out. There definitely was snow. It was on roofs and cars, trees and stone walls. But the road had snowless tracks that revealed the dark surface, blessedly free of ice. Only the middle was still snowy. The people were standing on the other side of the narrow road, looking down the slope to the east, where there was a gap between walls. Simmy couldn’t see the object of their attention, but she heard a man say, ‘We’ll have to see if we can push it.’ Another man replied, ‘Better to get a tractor.’ A vehicle, then, had left the road, and
was somehow stuck. The slope was gentle at that point, the accident apparently not serious.
But it could have been me
, Simmy thought with a shiver. She closed the window and quickly got dressed. The view from her bedroom was of the fells to the east, the church tower just visible in its hollow, crags mistily to the north. There was snow up there, its depth hard to gauge. Kirkstone might be closed; Garburn an unthinkable exercise. Her father’s projected walk now seemed close to insanity.

Hesitantly she went outside, to see what was happening. The moment she came into view, one of the men called to her. ‘Hey, Mrs Brown – any chance of you lending a hand?’

She looked at her feet, clad in loose-fitting shoes. ‘Let me get my boots,’ she called back. The idea that she might become one of the rescuers came as a major surprise. In under a minute she was striding towards the troubled car, flexing her inadequate muscles. Two men and a woman were attempting to find enough traction to heave the silver-grey Mondeo back onto the road from its crooked position. Muddy grooves gave witness to frantic attempts to drive it out, dirty snow splashed all around. ‘Simmy. Call me Simmy,’ she said, as she found a space and laid her bare hands on the cold metal.

‘Haven’t you got any gloves?’ the woman – or, more accurately,
girl
– asked.

‘I forgot them. I’ll be okay.’

‘You’d be more use at the front,’ said one of the men, who she recognised as living at Town Head. ‘Open the driver’s door, and steer, will you? You can push at the same time.’

It felt like a very responsible job, surely one generally
adopted by a man. Awkwardly, she obeyed, worrying that if the car slid in the wrong direction, she might fall underneath it, or be squashed between it and a nearby wall. Did they regard her as dispensable, then? The least valuable member of the team?

‘One, two, three,’ chanted the man, and they all heaved in unison. Simmy’s right foot locked against a convenient stone, and she felt the whole car shift forward. ‘Again!’ ordered the man, and this time Simmy was required to pull the steering wheel round, to guide the wheels out onto the road. The car hesitated and lurched and was then moving freely. It was all over very quickly. ‘Jump in, will you?’ the man called to Simmy. ‘Pull it up just down there.’ She assumed he meant a slightly wider stretch of road, fifteen yards away. Feeling impressively agile, she made a graceful leap onto the driving seat, and pulled the door shut after her. Steering could have been impossible, she realised, in most modern cars, with the ignition off. But this one did as it was told, and she gently directed it as instructed, braking delicately once it was properly straight, and in no danger of being stuck again.

Everyone clapped their mittened hands together, and smiled at each other. Simmy got out. ‘Oh, thank you, everybody,’ said the car’s owner. ‘What a fool I was!’

Only then did Simmy recognise her. It was the girl from the Giggling Goose, on Wednesday morning. The one whose chair Mr Kitchener had accidentally kicked. ‘Do you live here?’ she blurted, without thinking.

The girl tilted her head as if to suggest politely that the question might be a trifle abrupt. ‘Actually, no. I’m staying in Windermere for a few days, and decided to come and
explore. Stupid, obviously. But I have to get back later today, and I wanted to fit as much in as I could.’

‘You were lucky to get up Holbeck,’ said the man from Town Head. ‘If that’s the way you came.’

‘I followed a tanker. It made some useful tracks,’ she laughed. ‘Then I met a big van and went skewing off the road. It was terrifying.’

‘You could have done some damage if you’d hit the wall,’ said the other man. Simmy remembered him calling her
Mrs Brown
, and wished she could think of his name. She had not been as sociable as she might, she admitted, since arriving in Troutbeck. Everyone in the village shop had always been friendly and interested. They mostly knew she ran Persimmon Petals in Windermere. Some had promised to patronise her next time they needed flowers. She had been invited to join a variety of clubs and groups, but never quite taken the plunge. Perhaps over the winter, when there was little else to do, she would make the effort.

‘So I see,’ grimaced the girl. ‘I chose a daft time to come exploring, didn’t I. Somebody told me to have a look at the east window in the church, and I was looking for it. I thought I might join in with a service, if there is one today.’ She looked brightly around at the faces of her rescuers.

‘I saw you in Ambleside on Wednesday,’ said Simmy, with a sense of needing to establish some degree of truth. A wild suspicion was taking root in her head, and she saw no reason to hold back from trying to pin it down.

‘Help!’ squealed the girl, appealing to the two men. When they showed no sign of responding, she made an exaggerated show of capitulation, bending her knees and spreading her hands. ‘Where did you see me?’

Simmy was badly wrong-footed, she realised. Although the men were starting to drift away, nodding blandly and glancing at their watches, they were also giving her strange looks. ‘Sorry,’ she said lightly. ‘I was just surprised to recognise you. I thought I knew your face, you see, and then it came back to me. Quite a lot has happened since then. It was in the Giggling Goose café,’ she added, belatedly answering the question.

‘Oh … right. The one up that lovely little hill, by the river. It’s gorgeous, isn’t it.’

‘It’s a ghyll,’ said Simmy. ‘Stock Ghyll. Bigger than a beck, but smaller than a river. I think.’

One of the men looked back and snorted. ‘A ghyll’s a ravine, by rights.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ argued the other. ‘It’s a stream, just as Simmy says.’ He threw her a supportive glance, proud of himself for getting her name right.

‘I went up to see the waterfall,’ interrupted the nameless girl. ‘It was fantastic.’

‘Even better after this snow. Worth a picture or two,’ nodded the arguer. ‘Now it’s time I shifted myself. I only came out for a paper.’ The shop was still some distance away, its existence a vital beacon in Simmy’s life. ‘Mind how you go,’ he adjured the car driver. ‘Best not try to get down to the church from here. It’ll be slippery.’ Both men walked away, chatting softly together.

‘Is your name
Simmy
?’ queried the girl. ‘What’s that short for, then?’

‘Persimmon. And you are …?’ she said boldly.

‘Candy. Short for Candida. We’ve both got weird names, haven’t we. I never heard of a person called Persimmon before. It’s a fruit, isn’t it?’

Simmy’s lurking suspicion, based on nothing more than a husky voice heard over the phone, was dramatically confirmed. But she was beaten to the post by a mirroring realisation from the other. ‘Wait a minute … Are you the flower woman? Persimmon Petals? My God!’

‘That’s me. Why?’ A need for caution was suddenly pressing upon her. She kept a blank expression, giving nothing away.

‘Oh, it just seems such a coincidence. I saw your shop in Windermere … that tower thing in the window. It’s not so surprising really, I suppose.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘I’ll have to go. Shame about the church – but the snow’s beautiful, isn’t it. I do love snow.’

Evidently the same wariness was gripping Candida. She wasn’t going to admit to ordering flowers from a mysterious granddaughter, just as Simmy was hiding the fact that she remembered those flowers and who they had been delivered to. Or her understanding of the fact that the same granddaughter had been sitting in a café, barely a hundred yards from the old lady’s house. Something wrong was happening; something sinister and worrying. And yet the girl’s face was perfectly frank and open, with no hint of a secret.

Suddenly, Simmy wanted Ben. Young Ben Harkness would extract the logical thread from this confusion and make everything clear.

But then all concealment fell away, and Candida said, ‘You won’t tell her, will you?’

‘Tell who? What?’

‘The old lady. She’ll probably ask you who sent the flowers. You knew it was me, didn’t you? I saw it in your
face when I said my name. But I really don’t want you to give me away just yet. It’s all terribly delicate, you see.’

Obfuscation seemed futile. ‘She already did ask me for your name. And no, I didn’t tell her. You asked me not to.’

‘That’s really nice of you. I don’t suppose it was very easy.’

‘You should go and see her, and explain. That’s if you really are her grandchild. She’s convinced that you can’t possibly be.’

‘And you want the mystery solved, I see.’ She gave Simmy a sideways look, as if reading her mind. Simmy felt a surge of resentment. This child was nearly twenty years her junior. She shouldn’t be cleverer in any way. Then she remembered Ben, who was cleverer than almost everybody.

Candida laughed. ‘I’ve had a lifetime of secrets, so I’ve had lots of practice. They’re just starting to crawl out of the woodwork now.’

Simmy frowned. ‘They couldn’t have been
your
secrets, though. I mean – if there’s a mystery around your birth, that’s other people’s doing, isn’t it?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But ever since I was about twelve, I’ve known I couldn’t be the biological child of the woman I know as mother. We did genetics at school, and the teacher said it was impossible.’

‘How very irresponsible!’

‘No, it wasn’t. I mean, it was all quite impersonal. I just knew I was adopted, from then on. But they still wouldn’t tell me the whole story until I was sixteen.’

‘And Mrs Joseph really is your grandmother?’

‘Right.’ She paused. ‘Look, I really must go. It’s all so complicated, and I can’t tell you more than that. I’ve
already said far too much. I expect the old lady was upset by those flowers. I didn’t think it through very well, but when I found out it was her birthday, I couldn’t resist it. It was stupid.’

Simmy said nothing. She had as much of the story as she wanted or needed. Her hands were blue with cold, and she was hungry for some breakfast.

‘And I’ll have to make sure the car’s all right. I borrowed it, you see. No way I can afford a car.’

‘But you
have
passed your test?’

‘Oh, yes. I was seventeen and two months,’ she boasted. ‘My dad taught me when I was sixteen, on an old van. We drove across the fields in it. I’m really a good driver.’

Simmy supposed that that explained the girl’s bravado in tackling steep, snowy country lanes early on a Sunday morning. ‘Fields?’ she echoed. Hadn’t Candida’s address been somewhere in the urban wastes of Liverpool?

‘My dad’s brother and family live on a farm in Cheshire.’

Simmy heard the automatic reference to ‘dad’ and wondered at the complexities of adoption, where a person didn’t know quite what to call the assortment of parents that they were liable to end up with.

‘I see,’ she nodded. ‘Well, bye, then.’

Candida Hawkins got into her borrowed Mondeo, and Simmy went back into her cottage, her head stuffed with half-answered questions.

‘But where’s the link with Nancy Clark?’ persisted Ben, when Simmy phoned him and told him the whole story.

‘There isn’t one. There never
was
one. We were daft to think there might be. It’s quite illogical.’

‘My gut tells me otherwise,’ he said sonorously. ‘There
is
something connecting them. The Kitchener man proves that. He knows everyone, from all sides. I think he deliberately got himself seen by you, so he’d have an alibi. I bet he killed her, all along.’

‘He couldn’t have done that. Don’t get into conspiracy theories, for heaven’s sake. If you start thinking like that, you can dream up any wild notion. Stick to facts, okay. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me and Melanie to do?’

The boy was undaunted. ‘We ought to go and retrace your steps from Mrs Joseph’s house to the Giggling Goose, and check the timings. After all, that girl was in there, too.
And that’s crazy! She must have been watching out for you, to make sure you delivered the flowers as she wanted. Maybe she was lurking round the corner, to get a glimpse of her old granny. And Kitchener was there as well. Maybe they
know
each other. It’s definitely sinister, Simmy. You must see that.’

‘It’s mysterious,’ she conceded. ‘But things always are, once you start delving into people’s lives. And Ambleside’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone else. Melanie understands all that side of it.’

‘So – let’s go and have a look,’ he encouraged.

‘I’m not going anywhere with all this snow,’ she objected. ‘I might never get home again.’

‘Snow?’

‘Haven’t you got it?’

‘Not a flake. Serves you right, for living up there in the mountains. Your weather is way worse than ours.’

‘But it’s only three miles away!’

‘And a hundred and fifty metres higher. That makes a difference.’

‘It doesn’t sound much,’ she said obstinately, trying not to think of the long climb up to Troutbeck from the lakeside road.

‘How much snow is there, anyway?’

‘At least an inch.’

He laughed. ‘Wow!’

‘It’s scary, Ben. Look how that girl skidded off the road, right near my house.’

‘And that’s another thing,’ he responded swiftly. ‘Why was she there? She was stalking you, I bet. Wanted to see where you lived and what you looked like. You should be worrying about that, not a few flakes of snow.’

‘She came to look at the church. People do, you know. That window’s famous.’

‘Huh!’ he snorted. ‘Nobody under forty goes to look at churches. Be realistic. What was she like, exactly?’

‘Pretty. About nineteen. Big mouth, small eyes, dark hair. She had a woolly hat on today, but not on Wednesday. She seems nice,’ she finished feebly.

‘But you do have to wonder what exactly was she doing in the café, so close to Mrs Joseph’s house? There must have been more to it than a random place to have coffee.’

‘I don’t know. She said she was staying here for a few days and wanted to explore.’ Simmy tried to recall every word of the conversation. ‘I suppose she must be a student on vacation.’

‘Which university, I wonder?’

‘Why does that matter?’

‘It doesn’t,’ he agreed easily. ‘She’s
here
now. That’s the main thing. We ought to warn Mrs Joseph, at the very least. She might be in for another nasty shock.’

Simmy had a sensation akin to how she imagined a rider felt when their horse bolted. ‘I wish I’d never told you,’ she grumbled. ‘You’re going far too fast.’

‘So – what? We just sit at home and forget the whole thing? Leave the cops to struggle all on their own?’ His ironic tone was one of the things she knew she would never forget about Ben. Most people would find it annoying, she supposed – a teenager acting as if he knew so very much more than people twice his age couldn’t fail to get backs up. But she rather liked it. In some ways it reminded her of her mother, who was another person who held scant respect for the brainpower of the population in general.

‘I wasn’t aware that we were helping the cops. I thought we were helping Mrs Joseph work out what happened in her family.’

‘Not at all,’ he said forcefully. ‘That wouldn’t be any of our business, would it? We’re much more interested in the murder.’

‘But you said we ought to warn Mrs J.’ Inconsistency was one of the less appealing aspects of a high IQ, she was discovering. It probably meant she had failed to catch a subtle implication, or a jump in the boy’s reasoning.

‘Only that there’s a dodgy character hanging around. You can’t betray Candida Whatsit’s confidences. You’ve been clear on that from the start.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed uncertainly. ‘I’m sorry, Ben, but I think you just lost me.’

‘Never mind. Listen – you know Wilf?’

‘Your brother. Yes.’

‘He’s got a mate that he hangs out with sometimes, called Scott, who works at the hospital. He’s a porter. Takes the bodies down to the mortuary, among other things. And gets to see what’s going on down there. Picks up the gossip. All the stuff about post-mortems and pathology. Anyway, Scott told Wilf there was a real buzz about the way the Clark lady was murdered. Some sort of lethal injection, so the story goes. They found the site where it went in – right into a vein. Dirty great needle it must have been.’ His voice was breathless with excitement, and Simmy wondered how he had managed to let her prattle on about cars in the snow when he had something so thrilling to impart.

‘And the police want to keep it secret,’ she said, feeling
uneasy. ‘Scott shouldn’t be gossiping about it. Don’t they tell him to keep his mouth shut?’

‘I doubt it. Nobody ever thinks about the porters. They’re just part of the furniture. They probably assume they’re all foreign or too thick to understand what they hear. Scott’s actually rather bright. He says he’s gathering material for a book. He wants to write thrillers, so he needs to know all the ways people can be killed.’

Simmy sighed inwardly at this new glimpse of the world of young men, where reality merged uncomfortably with fantasy. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was Wilf’s kind of thing,’ she said. ‘He seems very grounded to me.’

‘He likes to keep abreast of things.’ Ben sounded offended at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘And this is important. It means the killer had some sort of medical connections – access to hypodermics and toxic substances.’

‘Maybe he robbed a GP surgery – or a vet. They have stuff to put animals down, don’t they? And dentists,’ she added wildly. ‘Novocaine and so forth. Would a big dose of that kill someone?’

‘That’s better,’ the boy approved. ‘Now you’re getting into the spirit of it. Dentists – I never thought of that. I bet their security is nowhere near as good as doctors or vets. They have all sorts of people wandering about unsupervised at the one I go to. If you knew what to look for, you’d easily be able to grab a couple of phials when their backs were turned.’

His imagination was irresistibly infectious. ‘That would definitely make it premeditated, and not a burglary that got out of control. That’s horrible. Poor old lady. And
why
? What could anybody have against her?’

‘She must have been in the way somehow. Or done something to make somebody really hate her. But we don’t know what she was like. Was she nice or nasty? What did she do for a job? All that sort of stuff is missing. We need Melanie,’ he went on decisively. ‘And her granny. I’ll call her now, and see if she’s up for a get-together. We can all go and chat to the granny this afternoon.’

‘Ben – I told you, I’m not driving anywhere in all this snow.’

‘Look out of the window. The sun’s shining. It’s about seven degrees out there. I bet you every morsel of snow’ll be gone by eleven. Don’t be so soft.’

She swallowed down her protests at being spoken to like that. Ben was her friend, even if he was twenty-one years her junior. They had fallen into easy conversation within moments of first meeting and had enjoyed a mutual liking ever since. Besides, he was almost certain to be right about the weather. In true geeky fashion, he was always well aware of the elements and what they would deliver next.

‘My dad said it would snow again today, worse than before.’

‘Well, he’s wrong. The forecast has changed drastically since this time yesterday.’

‘Even so, we can’t just descend on Melanie’s gran without warning,’ she objected weakly.

‘Which is why I’m going to call her now and see if she thinks it’ll be okay.’ The exaggerated patience was definitely patronising. ‘Can you be down here at two, and we’ll take it from there? I’ll get back to you if it’s not going to happen, right? If you don’t hear anything, assume that’s the plan.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘My house. You can find it, can’t you? Helm Road. House with yellow door.’ He added the number for good measure, and she confirmed that she could easily find it. ‘But I haven’t said I’ll come yet,’ she remembered crossly. ‘I’ve got things to do here.’ The last was not really true. Sunday afternoons could stretch boringly slowly, occupied only by housework, if there was no prospect of a walk or shop-related paperwork.

‘You’ll come,’ he laughed. ‘If you don’t hear back from me, assume it’s all fixed. Right?’

‘Don’t tell Melanie what Scott said,’ she urged. ‘She might pass it back to Joe and that’d cause trouble for Scott.’

He was silent for a few seconds. ‘Wilf said the same thing. But she’ll be furious when she finds out. We ought not to have secrets from each other. We’re a gang, after all.’

‘Are we?’ Was it possible for a thirty-eight-year-old florist to be in a gang? It sounded ridiculously childish, the way he said it. And at the same time, it gave her a ridiculously childish thrill.

‘Definitely,’ he asserted. ‘See you later.’

Without Ben, life would be very different, she reflected, over her solitary lunch of lamb chops. Her mother had somehow befriended a smallholder in Coniston, years ago, who sold her whole carcases for the freezer at rock-bottom prices. Since Angie’s freezers were always uncomfortably full, Simmy was used as an overflow – which meant she always had more than enough meat to eat. Not to mention all the apples that accumulated through the autumn, to be stewed with blackberries or plums and used for pies all through the winter. Seldom enticed by the lavish displays
on supermarket shelves, Simmy was glad to keep things basic, seasonal and cheap.

Ben was a dynamo, a hothouse of ambitions and theories. He had eagerly involved himself in solving the investigation into the violent deaths of two men back in October, putting himself in sufficient danger to warrant a warning from Detective Inspector Moxon not to be so cavalier in future. At the same time, he had earned gratitude and admiration from the relatives of the victims. Not to mention envy from Melanie and bewilderment from his parents. He relished the intellectual puzzle that lay at the heart of any but the most straightforward murder. He reminded Simmy and Melanie that a significant proportion of homicides were never solved. Killers escaped without punishment and families remained stuck in agonised frustration.

None of which was of much help to Simmy as she tried to establish her own role in the Ambleside murder. By any reckoning, she was being inexorably drawn in – first by the accident of being able to give Mr Kitchener an alibi, then by her lunch with DI Moxon in the pub and now by Ben’s increasing conviction that there was a definite connection between Mrs Mary Joseph and Miss Nancy Clark. This last was still hard to believe, based, as it seemed to be, on the most tenuous of links.

But Ben had been right about the snow, and Russell had been wrong, which was not unusual. Although the fells were still white, the roads were clear and there was no sign of ice. So long as she got home again by about five, she supposed she could make the short trip down to Bowness and back without undue risk. With a host of very mixed feelings, she drove carefully down the twists and turns of
Holbeck Lane and out onto the main road a mile or two south of Ambleside.

Ben met her on the doorstep of his parents’ house, and jumped into the passenger seat without a word. He then directed her back the way she had come, to Oak Street, not far from the station. Melanie’s gran lived in a two-storey terrace house, made of the ubiquitous dark stone, Simmy discovered. There was a narrow strip of front garden, hardly big enough to turn round in. A dead-looking shrub pressed itself against the wall of the house. Simmy found herself feeling idiotically shy.

‘Hiya!’ Melanie carolled from somewhere behind them, as they stood at the door. ‘Brill timing, you two. Gran’s ever so excited about all this. She can’t wait to show you her old photos. Brace yourselves.’ She pushed open the door, which was obviously not locked, and led the way into a dark little hallway.

The existence of a grandfather came as a big surprise to Simmy. She was sure she had never once heard Melanie mention him. But there he was, in a deep velvet reclining armchair, his feet almost level with his head, turning an indifferent gaze upon them. ‘Barb!’ he called. ‘They’re here. Melly and her friends. Let themselves in as bold as brass, they have.’

A coal fire was smouldering in a generously sized grate, throwing out heat that had to negotiate the old man’s legs before reaching the rest of the room.

A tall woman with silver hair came through from a door at the back of the room, carrying a substantial wooden tray laden with mugs of tea and heavy dark cake. Her back was straight and her eyes clear. ‘How lovely!’ she breathed. ‘I’m
ever so pleased to meet you properly. I’m Barbara Ellis. Call me Barb – everyone does.’

She was addressing Simmy, who held out a hand, and smiled as broadly as she could. ‘I hope we’re not intruding,’ she said. ‘It does seem a bit of a cheek.’ She found that she did recognise the elderly woman, from occasional visits to the shop. The soft accent and intelligent gaze had made an impression on her, but she had never made a connection between the customer and Melanie. Probably because Melanie had never been there when her grandmother called in.

‘Not a bit of it. Melly explained it all. How you’ve met up with Mary Joseph, and this boy here wants to practise for his studies, asking me questions.’ She faltered slightly, and busied herself with handing out the tea and cake. Nobody was offered sugar, and milk had already been added without consultation. Simmy resolved to tell her mother that here was a woman she would find highly compatible. ‘Have I got that right?’ the hostess asked, after a moment. ‘About his studies?’